Change happens.
I had no idea when I was a kid that things would be different when I grew up. Our farm was about seven miles north of the
Visalia city limits. I remember once when riding in our
car with my mom and asking, "Would the town ever reach our farm?" Mom laughed and said, "No." It is interesting how the city limits now reach the levee banks of the
Saint John's River - well on the way in the direction of the farm.
My folks now live in a development north of the old city limits - they sold out all of their land, the home I was raised in, and their farm equipment. I think the population of Visalia back when I was a kid was around 30,000 people, and as I remember, the cost of gasoline was around 33 cents a gallon - that was the price on the gas pump at the station where we filled up. Gas is over $3.00 a gallon right now, and the town's population is more than 125,000 - it was only 40,000 when I left in 1975.
As far back as I can remember, we grew a lot of cotton on the farm - Acala, a long staple variety of
Upland cotton. As of the late 1950's, we used
weeder geese to control nutsedge and grassy weeds, but new herbicides came along that easily controlled some -
Treflan, and hard-to-contol Johnsongrass -
Ansar. The sounds and sights of
crop dusters and the smell of
defoliants at the end of the season were familiar every year. There were other names common to cotton:
Calcot,
Cotton Incorporated, California Cotton Planting Seed Distributors (
CPCSD) , and Ranchers Cotton Oil.
Another tradition was the annual members dinner for the Visalia Cooperative Cotton Gin - the place where our trailer stuffed with our harvest would go to have the lint separated from the seeds. The dinner was held at the
Dinuba Memorial Building - the Veterans building in a town about 13 miles north of our farm. Other than having to sit through talks from the stage, a memory from each meeting was the match books that had a curious cartoon inside showing two mules that learned a lesson together about what cooperation can accomplish. I had no idea back then that the purpose for cooperatives was an expression of the cartoon series inside of the match book.
Jump ahead 56 years, and there was an article in the
USDA Rural Development cooperative magazine titled,
When a Coop Dies. My mom told me about the feature story, about the Visalia Coop closing down because the acres of cotton once familiar to the east side of the San Joaquin Valley had been replaced by grapes, oranges, almond, and dairies - times had changed, agricultural geography had changed.
My dad was invited to cast an honorary vote on Sept. 11, 2006 with the board of directors to close out the coop. Even though the economics of the cotton industry and agricultural economy had changed, what hadn't changed is the need for cooperation - even when closing out a cooperative that had run its time of usefulness.
Another tradition was the annual members dinner for the Visalia Cooperative Cotton Gin - the place where our trailer stuffed with our harvest would go to have the lint separated from the seeds. The dinner was held at the Dinuba Memorial Building - the Veterans building in a town about 13 miles north of our farm. Other than having to sit through talks from the stage, a memory from each meeting was the match books that had a curious cartoon inside showing two mules that learned a lesson together about what cooperation can accomplish. I had no idea back then that the purpose for cooperatives was an expression of the cartoon series inside of the match book. 
